Labor: Painters in Blood

Dow Wilson was never a man to be ignored. A
swashbuckling, Shakespeare-spouting romantic, he was also a volatile,
foulmouthed labor leader who spent years fighting chicanery in his
union's higher echelons. As the $13,000-a-year secretary of the
Brotherhood of Painters, Decorators and Paperhangers' San Francisco
Local 4biggest in the U.S.he commanded the unwavering allegiance of
nearly all 2,600 local members. Wilson, 40, was parted from that job on
April 5, when shotgun blasts tore into his chest and shattered his
skull.

Wilson's murder, an unsettling echo of labor's internecine wars in the
'30s, came as a grisly epilogue. His career had...